Music

Saturday, December 31, 2016

We at SLIFR University are fully aware that most of you are
probably settling in for the last few days of a hopefully restful and renewing
holiday season, or at least the meaty part of a long three-day weekend meant to
celebrate the passing of a spent and stressful old year and the hope (fingers
and hearts and minds crossed) of a better one over the 365 days to come. But we
also believe in the value of unexpected education, particularly as it pertains
to the concept of the pop quiz. And what quiz could pop more unexpectedly than
one dropped on the student whose thoughts are conveniently focused on seasonal
celebrations at the expense of her or his studies? Can we get a sinister
chuckle?

Certainly our esteemed professor of the moment is eminently
qualified to bring forth such a noise. It is our honor and privilege to present
to you now this latest quiz as administered by its author, SLIFR University’s
very own Dean of Philosophical Ethics, Professor James Moriarty. The professor,
who reminds his students that of all subjects his own shadowy past is the one
that may not be broached during
classroom hours (he believes that to be a topic for discussion best suited for
private sessions in the his eerie clock tower office perched high above the
SLIFR campus), has said that he desires to take us forth into the coming year
with our minds set on the lessons of the past year that we can gather from our
experiences and apply to the various ethical situations with which we may soon find
ourselves faced. But, being the pesky mastermind that he is (evil or merely
amoral—you must decide), it may be that he’s just toying with the minds of his
students, tossing out matters of trivia meant to distract from those very ethical
concerns, all the better to set the traps, academic and otherwise, he has
hidden between the lines of his seemingly innocuous syllabus.

The only way to find out for sure is to proceed with the
quiz and take your chances. Here’s how the professor demands it be done. Answer
each thoroughly, to the best of your abilities, at any length you choose, but
remembering that the more verbose the response, the more credit you will
receive in the professor’s ledger. And when you answer, be sure to cut and paste the question along with your answer into the
comments section so your answer may be more easily understood. Due to
current space restrictions on Blogger, you may find it necessarily to post your
answers in two or three sections. Or, if you have your own site, feel free to
post a link to that location so we can read your answers there.

So, without further delay, let us get under way. The
professor waits for no one, especially bleary-eyed students who wish they were
anywhere else but at their desks, awaiting further instructions. Number twos
up. You may now open your blue books… and begin.

****************************

1) Best movie of 2016

2) Worst movie of 2016

3) Best actress of 2016

4) Best actor of 2016

5) What movie from 2016
would you prefer not hearing another word about? Why?

6) Second-favorite
Olivier Assayas movie

7) Miriam Hopkins or Kay
Francis?

8) What’s the story of your
first R-rated movie?

9) What movie from any
era that you haven’t yet seen would you be willing to resolve to see before
this day next year?

10) Second-favorite Pedro
Almodovar movie

11) What movie do you
think comes closest to summing up or otherwise addressing the qualities of
2016?

Thursday, December 29, 2016

This is the only and only photo that I can find of the
creaky old Mayflower Theater in Eugene, Oregon. (Surely others exist, right?) The
theater was located near the corner of 11th and Alder, and it was situated
directly across the street from where the original Animal House was located. The
photo dates somewhere in the late fall of 1985, based on the movies listed on the
marquee. A few months later, sometime in 1986, the Mayflower would be closed
for good. Neither it, nor the dilapidated halfway house that stood in for the
home of Delta Tau Chi, stands today, but at least the Delta House got a plaque.
No such remembrance was in waiting for this unassuming little dump, never a
great technical showcase for cinema, even though this is where Star Wars opened in Eugene in May 1977
and where it played till the end of that same year. But those who were seeing
movies in Eugene during the ‘60s and ‘70s undoubtedly have happy memories of it
nonetheless. The Mayflower might never have been where you would have chosen to
see a movie back in 1977, but given that there wasn’t much in the way of choice
it often had to do. Even so, it’ll always be one of the signposts of my own
discovering of a world much larger and more exciting than the one in which I grew up.

The first movie I ever saw at the Mayflower was not Star Wars, however. In early 1975 our
high school pep band followed the basketball team to the state basketball
tournament, and one night a bunch of us hiked through downtown toward the
University of Oregon campus to see Young
Frankenstein. And in June of 1976, a little over a year before I would
start classes at Oregon myself, a friend and I hopped in his VW Bug and made
the five-hour drive to Eugene from our hometown in Southeastern Oregon for a
weekend of movies. He had already spent a year there and was getting ready to
go back for another, so he knew most of the places to go, and our first stop in
town was the Mayflower, where we saw a double feature of Mel Brooks’ Silent Movie and Michael Ritchie’s Smile. I loved both movies, and being
there made me feel like I was getting a taste of a whole new, somewhat musty, but
undoubtedly wonderful world. And I did see Star Wars there during the summer of
1977, while on a student orientation visit with my family, though I can
remember barely being able to concentrate on the movie for the nervousness I
felt at coming to Eugene to live on my own only a couple months later. Though it had almost 10 years of life left in
it, the Mayflower already felt run-down, yet it felt like such a step up from
seeing one movie a week in my quaint little hometown theater that I was willing
to forgive it just about anything.

I remember a few things about the Mayflower: the ragged red
curtains along the walls of the wide but not very deep auditorium; the aroma of
popcorn mingling with the faint scent of disinfectant in the air; the black masking
along the top and bottom of the screen forever exposed due to the absence of a
retractable curtain; the glass windows that looked out on the auditorium from
the halls next to the projection booth which led to the men’s and women’s
restrooms, constructed so that patrons could watch the movie (and hear the
muffled sound through the glass) while they stood wiggling, waiting for the occupants
of the ancient single-occupancy stalls to vacate; the box office located just
inside the outside breezeway (it’s visible behind the little Renault in the
photo) which was always crammed with posters and other significant junk, which seemed
like a pretty keen place in which to be encased, to my young eyes, anyway—those
dispensing tickets might have felt differently. None of these details make the
place sounds particularly endearing, but endearment isn’t something bestowed—it
happens naturally, and maybe in the case of the Mayflower it was also earned.

The Mayflower was in many ways a gateway movie theater to me, and it was also where I learned to love the midnight movie. In 1977 there
were no lack of film societies on campus which filled the numerous lecture
halls with 16mm revival screenings of films from every genre, temperament and
nation every single weekend, all in compliment to the mainstream theaters,
drive-ins and homegrown art houses like Cinema 7 and the Waco Twin, which was located
right off campus just behind my freshman dorm room. For a maturing movie lover
who still had plenty of ground to discover, especially in the world of
international cinema, such bounty was a dream come true every Friday and
Saturday, and sometimes during the week too.

But for the first year and into my
sophomore year of college life, the Mayflower was running midnight movies every
Saturday night, and sometimes Friday and
Saturday nights, at the tail end of the era, just before the emergence of the
first burst of home video popularity, when college students went out of their
way to see interesting second-run fare and unusual cult sensations from every
category. It was in this nondescript little cinema, after the evening showings
of the main feature finished up, where I saw such staples as Clockwork Orange, A Boy and His Dog, Fellini
Satyricon, Tunnelvision, The Exorcist, El Topo, Dog Day Afternoon, King of
Hearts, Harold and Maude and The
Graduate for the first time. Unfortunately, sometime during the fall of
1978 The Rocky Horror Picture Show arrived
at 11th and Alder, a phenomenon whose dominance spelled the end of
the age of repertory midnight movies at the Mayflower.

This broken-down would-be palace of pictures is notable in
my personal history for another reason too. It was here, just a week or two
after having met on the set of National
Lampoon’s Animal House which was shooting right across the street during
the fall of 1977, where my soon-to-be lifelong best friend Bruce and I journeyed
across campus one chilly Saturday night to take in the first of what would be
probably thousands of movies we’d see together over a subsequent run of 39
years.

The movie was, of course, Star Wars.
And being flush in the hardy and heady glory of youth, once the credits started
rolling on that one, we decided to go back outside and buy tickets for that
night’s midnight movie selection, a slightly late-starting double feature of Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Jabberwocky. We stumbled out onto the sidewalk on 11th
Street at around 3:30 in the morning and started the walk back across campus to
our dorm rooms. I’ve always thought,
though I don’t remember if I had the thought that evening, that any friendship which
starts with a 2:00 a.m. screening of Jabberwocky,
followedby conversation that was
surely more entertaining than the movie, could likely survive any storm, and
that assumption has most assuredly proven to be true. The best friendship of my
life was cemented within the none-too-sturdy walls of the old Mayflower Theater
in Eugene, Oregon. For that alone, it could have been the worst theater in town—
it wasn’t—and it’d still hold a special place in my heart.

Sunday, December 18, 2016

I’m guessing that you, just like most of us, have always had
seasonal favorites when it comes to movies that attempt to address and evoke
the spirit of Christmas. Like most from my generation, when I was a kid I
learned the pleasures of perennial anticipation of Christmastime as interpreted
by TV through a series of holiday specials, like How the Grinch Stole Christmas,A
Charlie Brown Christmas, Santa Claus is Coming to Town and even musical
variety hours where the likes of Bing Crosby and Andy Williams and Dean Martin
et al would sit around sets elaborately designed to represent the ideal
Christmas-decorated living room, drinking “wassail” (I’m sure that’s what was in
those cups) and crooning classics of the season alongside a dazzling array of
guests. (We knew we were moving into a new world of holiday cheer when David Bowie joined Bing Crosbyfor a Christmas duet of “Peace on Earth” and
“The Little Drummer Boy” on a Christmas special in 1977.)

TV was always a dominant window onto Christmas for kids my
age, and so it was when it came time to discovering, absorbing and then
engraining into perennial ritual some of the Christmas–themed movies of the
classic Hollywood era. I’d wager that most of us got our introduction to
pictures like It’s a Wonderful Life, Meet
Me in St. Louis, White Christmas, Miracle on 34th Street, The Bishop’s Wife
and Christmas in Connecticut via
network broadcasts or, even more likely, reliable appearances as filler on
local weekend afternoon TV schedules. And for many those movies became as much
a part of the annual celebration of the holiday as decorating the tree, or
attending Christmas Eve church services, or pretending not to notice the
Salvation Army guy clanging away outside the local supermarket.

But there are those who are always looking for additions to
the Christmas canon, or simply alternatives to the usual green-and-red-lit
movie fare. Maybe you’ve toured Bedford Falls with Jimmy Stewart once too
often. Perhaps you’ve had one too many merry little Christmases in the company
of Judy Garland and Margaret O’Sullivan. It just could be that you’re looking
for something beyond watching Bruce Willis load a dead, Santa cap-clad terrorist
into an elevator to deliver a very special holiday message. And maybe your
particular need cannot be filled by heading to the Redbox for Krampusor Jingle All the Way or any of the apparently thousands of
sentimental, often-Hallmark-produced paeans to the presumed ideal of the
season. (If something like Kirk Cameron's Saving Christmasis
what you’re looking for, you might be well advised to go pick that one up and
stop reading this article right now.)

Over the last decade or so I’ve cultivated a few new
perennial favorites, some of which are actually relatively “new,” a few of
which are demonstrably “old,” a couple featuring only isolated segments that
call up unusual manifestations of Christmas fear and alienation, and all of
which speak to my own particular wants and desires when it comes to conjuring
up a little anticipatory Christmas atmosphere in the age of the 65-inch flat
screen. These, then, are five of my essential Christmas classics, movies
without which Christmas just wouldn’t seem as rich and rewarding and somehow
reassuring. What Grinch would deny a garland-and-tinsel-encrusted movie fiend
such moments of delight?

Black Christmas(1974) Director Bob Clark’s elegantly
eerie, crudely effective shocker was one of the two seminal Christmas-themed
shockfests (the other one is mentioned here a bit further down the page) that,
when I saw them in a theater in the early ‘70s, highlighted for the first time
for me the rich possibility of terror and suspense that was if not inherent,
then only slightly papered over during the usual seasonal celebration.
Predating John Carpenter’s Halloween by four years, Black Christmas, along with Mario Bava’s A Bay of Blood (1971), to which the initial Friday the 13th movies owe a great debt, laid out the POV-laden
template for holiday-themed slashing that is still referenced by a host of
forward-thinking, backward-glancing filmmakers. Here the Christmas stockings are
hung by the chimney with care, along with the housekeeper and sundry other
unfortunates of a sorority house besieged by an obscene phone caller who has
more on his dirty mind than just getting his ornaments off. Olivia Hussey, Keir
Dullea, Andrea Martin, John Saxon and a glorious foul-mouthed Margot Kidder
head up a cast of Canadians whose indulgence of seasonal carolers is
interrupted by a real killer performance, and director Clark stuffs his
stocking with appearances by familiar faces like Lynne Griffin (Strange Brew, Curtains), Doug McGrath (The Outlaw Josey Wales) and Cronenberg
vets Art Hindle (The Brood) and Les
Carlson (Videodrome) too. The movie
leaves a genuinely wintry, icy chill in the air, one you take with you when the
lights come up.

Cash On Demand (1961) Hammer
Films, known for their output of classic horror films from the mid ‘50s through
the mid ‘70s, produced thislittle-seen,
diamond-sharp gem, which in its spirit anyway amounts to the transplanting of
Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge into a clever cat-and-mouse bank robbery scenario.
It’s , the day before Christmas Eve, the last day of business before the
holiday in the Haversham branch of the City and Colonial Bank, where Mr.
Fordyce (Peter Cushing), the fastidiously imperious branch manager, is roped
into a scheme to help the quick-witted and ingenious Col. Gore Hepburn (Andre
Morell) loot the vault, all while keeping his cowed, increasingly suspicious
staff unaware of what’s happening. Director Quentin Lawrence (The Crawling Eye) stages the action like
an unappreciated master, never pushing for lofty heights far beyond the
material’s stage-based conceit or distracting from the strength of his actors. As the smooth criminal, Hammer regular Morell (Shadow of the Cat, The Plague of the Zombies) exudes delightfully
sardonic pleasure in the ease with which he gets the straight-arrow manager
under his thumb— Hepburn’s haughty assurance is effortlessly matched by
Morell’s exactingly orchestrated, sinister charm, that of a Christmas ghost
most terribly present. But this show belongs to Cushing, who turns in one of
the most completely engaging and queasily empathetic performances of his
career. Cushing, a quietly imposing actor, knows exactly how to orchestrate
Fordyce’s maddening, Scrooge-esque officiousness, never letting the audience
lose sight of the small man beneath that masquerade of power, until a fuller
audience identification becomes necessary, inevitable. I saw this terrific
pictureagain just hours before
witnessing Cushing’s unsettling digital resurrection in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and the movie proved to be the
perfect proactive restorative to the memory of Cushing’s enduring inimitability.
Cash on Demand has snowy,
pre-Christmas atmosphere to spare, and it ends with a holiday blessing from the
most unlikely of sources, all of which seal it in my personal pantheon of
holiday perennials. And as an inventive, enjoyable and unexpected variation on
a Christmas classic, it beats the cratchit out of Bill Murray’s Scrooged or the ghastly digititis of
Robert Zemeckis’ crass CGI adaptation of A
Christmas Carol.

A Christmas Tale (2008) More than just a spiking of the usual
Hollywood holiday nog, Arnaud Desplechin’s family drama provides a welcome
corrective to movies like The Family
Stone and the usual sentimental shenanigans of the cinematic season while
proving that facile narrative manipulations aren’t required to create a
challenging and emotionally resonant experience. Abel and Junon (Jean-Paul
Rousillon, Catherine Deneuve) head the turbulent Vuillards, a cultured French
family still collectively reeling after the death of a child 30 years earlier, which
gathers together over Christmas when Junon reveals that she has a degenerative
cancer and is looking for a match within the family for a bone marrow
transplant. Unlike The Family Stone,
which also centers on the revelation of cancer devastating the body of its
materfamilias, Desplechin undermines sentimental traps by revealing the disease
right away and making the individual dramas within the group feel like painful
ripples originating from the children’s relationship with their loving but
matter-of-fact mother. Henri (Mathieu Amalric), the disaffected middle child
who may be the only suitable bone marrow donor, has a refreshingly acerbic
relationship with Junon—they openly acknowledge their disregard for each other
while never betraying a wary mutual devotion. He has been banished from the
family by his older sister, Elizabeth, a successful yet recessive playwright
(Anne Consigny) who has a protective relationship with her own emotionally
disturbed son, also a possible donor. And there is a tricky, beautifully
choreographed interplay between Ivan, the youngest Vuillard (Melvil Poupaud),
married to the lovely Sylvia (Chiara Mastroianni), and Simon (Laurent
Capelluto), Ivan’s cousin, a painter who has been obsessed with Sylvia since
they were all young. On paper these relationships might sound as prone to cliché
as those in The Family Stone. But the
magic of Desplechin’s film is in how the writer-director deftly avoids
histrionics while never stinting on substantive and immediate drama,
demonstrating how something likened to a Christmas spirit might reasonably
extend to the everyday. All the actors are grand in ways that perfectly suit
the material and Desplechin’s perspective on it, but special awe must be held
for Deneuve, who convinces us of the wry detachment which informs her matronly
concern and control without ever making an actorly show of it. She’s perfectly
magnificent.

Remember the Night (1940) Easily the most “traditional” movie on this short
list, Mitchell Leisen’s splendid comedy-drama, from a script by Preston
Sturges (the last one he would write before embarking on his own career as a
brilliant director of his own material), sends shoplifter Barbara Stanwyck and
her courtroom prosecutor, Fred MacMurray, on a Christmas road trip to visit
relatives, hers and his. When Stanwyck’s return home proves a devastating
fulfillment of her worst suspicions of maternal disregard, MacMurray decides to
bring her home to meet his own family, where a more resonant and meaningful
holiday lays waiting. The movie beautifully balances Sturges’ peerless wit with
Leisen’s talent for finding the undercurrent of pain beneath the familial pull,
and part of the movie’s enduring appeal for me is not only in its evocation of
a small-town Christmas experience, whether or not any such thing ever really
existed anywhere than in our memories, but also in the gentle reminders woven
within the story of how the joy of the Christmas holiday inevitably must give
way, with melancholy, to a return to the everyday and the unavoidable responsibilities
which come with it.For me Remember the Night has eclipsed the more
celebrated It’s a Wonderful Life, and
certainly the more atmospheric but considerably more synthetic pleasures of
Stanwyck’s other generally beloved holiday entry, Christmas in Connecticut, as the quintessential Hollywood movie
about the spirit of Christmas.

Tales from the Crypt (1972)
Obviously not a Christmas movie, this horror anthology based on stories
from the infamous EC comics series nonetheless sports one smashing
holiday-themed segment, “All Through the House,” in which a murderous spouse
(Joan Collins) gets her comeuppance when she crosses paths with a homicidal
Santa recently escaped from a nearby mental institution. Robert Zemeckis remade
this for the inaugural episode of the ‘90s HBO series (also titled Tales from the Crypt), but when seeking
out this tale it’s best to insist on the original. Here comes Santa Claus, here
comes Santa Claus…

Tommy (1975) Pete
Townshend’s rock opera, as interpreted by cinematic loose cannon nonpareil Ken
Russell (Lisztomania, The Music Lovers),
features one segment early on in which the titular deaf, dumb and blind boy
experiences—or rather remains outside of the experience of-- a typically loud,
ebullient child-oriented Christmas morning celebration. His mother and her
lover (Ann-Margret and Oliver Reed) rail against Tommy’s psychological absence,
the traumatic result of seeing them murder his real father, and despair, with
varying levels of sincerity and anger, over the spiritual vacuum within which
the boy seems trapped: “Tommy doesn’t know what day it is/He doesn’t know who
Jesus was or what praying is/How can he be saved/From the eternal grave?” It’s
a resonant song within the structure of the movie’s narrative, but it also
stands in for the easily accessible emotional and spiritual alienation that for
some is part and parcel of the holiday season.

A Very Harold and Kumar Christmas (2011) If you’re in the mood for an irreverent comic deconstruction of the
various excesses and indulgences of the Christmas season, it’s hard to imagine
how you could do any better than this near-brilliant third installment in the
popular Harold and Kumar series, in which our heroes (John Cho, Kal Penn),
distanced from each other by time, money and the encroaching responsibilities
of actual adulthood, find themselves thrown back together (reluctantly at
first, of course) in a desperate search throughout Manhattan for the perfect
Christmas tree. Along the way they encounter a murderous Russian mobster,
Jesus, Santa and, of course, their personal bête
noire, Neil Patrick Harris, again playing himself in a fearless act of
character self-immolation that ranks right up there with Jennifer Tilly’s
“Jennifer Tilly” in Seed of Chucky
and outdoes even his appearances in the previous two Harold and Kumar movies. Oh, yeah, our heroes also inadvertently
introduce a toddler to the Wu-Tang Clan and the pleasures of pot and cocaine
(this is not your father’s or your mother’s Christmas movie, duh) and end up being
chased by a giant rampaging Claymation snowman. Outrageous to the hilt, the
movie encompasses the relentless cheer, the mania, the materialism, the
sentiment and, of course, the gleeful immolation of everything good and sane
and delightful that Christmas stands for. And somehow it never fails to get me
in the Christmas spirit because, for all its relentless irreverence, it manages
to also sincerely embrace that spirit, however folded, spindled or otherwise
mutilated it may have become since the sorts of Christmases celebrated in
movies like Remember the Night. If
you can somehow see this movie in 3D, please do— along with Piranha 3D it
uses stereoptic technology to greater, and certainly funnier ends that just
about any movie of the modern 3D era. But even flat A Very Harold and Kumar Christmas is still a raunchy, red-nosed,
not to mention red-eyed riot, and around our house it’s a new Christmas classic
too.

Thursday, December 15, 2016

There’s no reason to expect anything but the usual tone-deaf
(and deafening) crass-fest after seeing the trailer for Central Intelligence.
But thankfully, although that advertising is trolling for the same audience, this
Kevin Hart picture is no Ride Along or Ride Along 2. Hart plays a forensic
accountant, disappointed by a routine life after his glory days as Central High
BMOC, who is roped into the usual nonsensical sell-the-nuclear-codes-and-find-out-who’s-really-the-bad-guy
plot by an old acquaintance, a sincere but insufferable and grossly overweight loser
whom Hart once helped out of an awful public humiliation in high school.

The
joke is, that once-obese pal has, over the course of 20 years, morphed into
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, still the same sweet, naïve, wounded guy from high
school, yet now sculpted (and Johnson is nothing if not sculpted) into a CIA
super-agent with mad fighting and murdering skills who may be working both
sides of the danger.

The movie could have taken the usual route, bullying and bashing
and fast-cutting its audience with nonstop sound and fury and crude jokes. And
there’s plenty of all that, to be sure. But Central Intelligence takes its
primary cue from its big, big star— for as much shooting and shouting and
general mayhem as it packs in (there’s even a nifty sequence of what Joe Bob
Briggs might have called motorcycle fu), it’s a surprisingly good-natured and,
relatively speaking, easy-going affair.

And that nature keeps us watching, not
because we’re interested in how the plot unfolds but because Johnson, who seems
to not only be up for anything but capable of anything (his magnetism and
confidence echoes that of Cary Grant), maintains such a lively tension between
playing against type and delivering the expected goods. It may sound strange,
but it’s nice to see an action comedy where bar fights and broken fingers and
unexpected car crashes (director Rawson Marshall Thurber honors the Termite
Terrace way by using the wide-screen frame to spring several keen vehicular
sight gags) are almost always followed by a shrug and that mile-wide Johnson
grin.

So it’s sorta perfect that we end up caring more about the movie’s
epilogue, set at Hart and Johnson’s 20-year class reunion, than the shopworn
action that leads up to it. The preternaturally self-assured Johnson wouldn’t
have it any other way, and if that personality can so blithely rescue such a
shopworn premise as the one Central Intelligence is built around, then long may
he Rock.

Saturday, December 03, 2016

Much has been said and written about the receiving and
processing of music as a spiritual experience, either in the religious sense,
as a way of attempting a connection with God, or in terms of feeling the lift
to one’s emotions, the rush of excitement that a great piece of music
well-played can offer to the human body and mind. The emotional aspect of
musical transportation is pretty easily accessed, on its basest and highest
planes. (Just ask any fan of screamo or Yo-Yo Ma.) And there are plenty of folks who will talk to you about
how contemporary Christian artists as varied as Keith Green, Becoming Saints
and Andre Crouch provide an aural pathway straight to the ear of God. For me, true incorporeal experiences with
music are fairly rare. But when I hear the music of late, indisputably great
jazz bassist Jaco Pastorius, or see him play, I often feel as though I’m
entering a genuine realm of the spiritual.

And yet, at the beginning of the documentary Jaco (2015), now
streaming on Netflix and other VOD services, here this great musician sits,
seen being interviewed by fellow bassist Jerry Jemmott just three years before
his death in 1987, his celebrated ego still apparent in his mastery of his
instrument, and in his relatively muted acceptance of Jemmott’s complimentary
inquisitiveness. “You’re able to play, with real sincerity, every style of
music, and not just every style, but all parts
of a given piece at the same time on this one instrument, the bass,” Jemmott
begins, all while we observe Pastorius’ body language begin to betray signs of
a man caving in on himself, haunted by demons too inexplicable for counsel or applied
chemistry. Jemmott continues: “Because of this, a lot of people have gone crazy
trying to duplicate what you do, and many people have become big fans of the
bass and given it a lot of attention. How do you feel about that?” Pastorius
pauses, lowers his head for a moment, and then pops up with a laugh: “Give me a
gig!”

At the point when this interview was conducted John Francis Anthony Pastorius
III, nicknamed “Jaco” by his mother, had already risen from a middle-class life
in Florida, the son of big band singer and drummer Jack Pastorius, to an association
with nascent guitar great Pat Metheny in 1973, and then to an introduction to
Blood, Sweat & Tears drummer Bobby Colomby, who arranged the circumstances
for Pastorius’s debut album in 1976, a record which was considered a
breakthrough for his instrument and featured jazz heavyweights such as Herbie
Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Lenny White and Hubert Laws, among several others. By
the time Pastorius began his run with Weather Report in 1976, he was widely
considered, particularly by himself, as the greatest bass player in the world,
and continued working with other artists like Metheny, Joni Mitchell and Al Di
Meola while laying the foundation for the expansion of his own solo career.

Yet by the time he sat down to talk with Jemmott for that
television interview Pastorius had already seen record company corruption and
resistance to his brilliant solo album Word of Mouth morph into out-and-out anger from the suits over his refusal to
allow himself to be sculpted into just another pop jazz fusion artist. The drugs
and alcohol he had always eschewed in the early stages of his career were now routine indulgences and had undoubtedly contributed to his increasingly
destabilized mental health, and by the time he
self-deprecatingly answered Jemmott’s question his erratic behavior on and off
stage had contributed to a situation where the greatest bass player in the
world could not find a job. At the time of the interview, scrambling for work,
battling bipolar disorder (for which he was hospitalized for a year) and living
off the occasionally beneficial remnants of his reputation, Jaco Pastorius, who
singlehandedly reinvented what the bass guitar could do, was a year or so away
from homelessness, living in a city park, and only a few years more removed from
a tragic, violent death.

The film about Pastorius, directed by Stephen Kijak (Scott Walker: 30 Century Man) and
documentary editor Paul Marchand (Good
Hair, The 50-Year Argument), details the meteoric ascent and ignominious
crumbling of its subject’s life largely in familiar, talking-heads fashion. Those
heads—among them Jemmott, Bootsy Collins, Geddy Lee, Metallica bassist Robert
Trujillo, Joni Mitchell and Weather Report drummer Peter Erskine— recognize the
disturbing elements of Pastorius’ ego and some of his choices while indulging
the usual sort of praise and secondhand confirmation of the unassailable talent
of the man they’ve been gathered to celebrate. In its form, the documentary
doesn’t find a correlative in the language of film to translate and illuminate
the musician’s mastery, or especially his demons. Thankfully, however, Kijak and
Marchand’s relatively conservative approach is free of the sensationalistic
desire to wallow in grim details of their subject’s decline. They trust the
eloquence, the passion, the genuine sadness of the people who care to honestly
remember who Pastorius was, what his music meant.

What makes Jaco
special, transporting, is Pastorius himself. The film features a treasure
chest’s worth of archival footage of Pastorius creating and expressing music,
as well as interacting with family and his peers, in moments of triumph,
exhaustion and vulnerability. Those eyes, guarded and haunted in moments of
self-reflection, lose their furtiveness in performance, and Pastorius’s slight
frame takes on a tensile, almost organic unity with his instrument as he wields
it on stage. As this brilliant musician runs his fingers along the neck of his
fretless bass, sliding and massaging and plucking notes and chords from his
electric instrument and coaxing it into making sounds that are rooted in the
familiarity of an upright acoustic bass yet somehow new, otherworldly,
untethered by the usual expectations, set free to roam past the usual
boundaries, it’s easy to believe, as I always have when listening to the music
he made, that no one else could ever do what he did. (It’s somewhat shocking,
and heartening, to see a close-up late in the film of fingers scampering across
another fretless bass, liberating the sort of glorious arrangement of tone and emboldened,
flirtatious, difficult melody that could only be Jaco, which pulls back to
reveal the player is actually Jaco’s
son, Felix.)

The music created by the merging of Jaco Pastorius with a
bass guitar is among the only music I’ve ever heard which can make me begin to
understand what a burdened soul suddenly shorn of unreasonable gravity might
feel as it begins to float free. What’s left behind is not so much corporeal
reality as the limiting expectations of what jazz, rock, classical, even
country—all genres for which Pastorius professes love in the film—can
ultimately become when given over to genius. The music Pastorius made joyfully
reflects both the depth of his exploratory ambition and the arrogance necessary
to sustain that ambition, while the sad circumstances of his shortened life
insistently round out the warm buzz and staccato chord formations which emanate
with no lack of mystery from his fingerboard. To its everlasting credit, Jaco recognizes the pain and blessedly indulges
our desire to experience the fusion of all those warring elements within
Pastorius’ music at its peak, to feel our collective souls, if only for the
moment, fly, fly away, the beneficiaries of Pastorius’s troubled, transcendent
mastery.